Tava Lennon Olsen

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• Ph.D. at Stanford University
• M.S. at Stanford University
• B.Sc. at University of Auckland

News Stories & Tip Sheets:

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Call center contracts put their clients on hold Some phone agreements have a catch March 2, 2005 -- When a company decides to turn to a call center to handle its customer service, company heads assume that signing a contract is the best way to get the best service. Not necessarily, says Tava Olsen, associate professor of operations and manufacturing management in the Olin School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis. Olsen and a colleague at the University of Toronto, found that some contracts allow call centers to meet their obligations half-way, leaving their clients — and their client's clients — on hold.

Supply chain management 'Dynamic Menus' help businesses cater to customers July 19, 2004 -- Olsen Today, when you walk into a car dealer and order a new automobile, you pay the same price and get the same wait for delivery as every other customer. But in the future, as Tava Olsen sees it, instead you'll select your price and delivery date from a dynamic menu of lead-times and prices, where you can pay more for quick delivery or get a better price for waiting. While such options benefit the customer, they also pay bottom-line benefits for the retailer and manufacturer, says Olsen, associate professor of operations and manufacturing at Washington University's Olin School of Business. To help companies reap those benefits, she's engaged in groundbreaking theoretical research funded by a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to tell them just how to do it.

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Areas of Expertise:

Management Science - Math Programming; Simulation Modeling; Stochastic Processes; Operations & Manufacturing Management - Inventory Control, Production Planning, and Scheduling; Operations Strategy

Research interests:

Supply chain management, e-commerce, manufacturing systems analysis and control, control of wireless communication networks, and queueing theory

Selected Publications:

* "Analytic Models for When and How to Expedite," IIE Transactions, with H. Arslan and H. Ayhan, forthcoming

* "Coordinating Production and Delivery Under a (z,Z)-type Vendor Managed Inventory System," M&SOM, with M. J. Fry and R. Kapuscinski, forthcoming

* "On Mutually Interfering Parallel Servers Subject to External Disturbances," Operations Research, with K. M. Wasserman, forthcoming

* "Approximations for the Waiting Time Distribution in Polling Models With and Without State-Dependent Setups," Operations Research Letters, forthcoming

* "Limit Theorems for Polling Models with Increasing Setups," Probability in the Engineering and Informational Sciences, 2001

* "Scheduling of a multi-class single server queue under non-traditional performance measures," Operations Research, with H. Ayhan, 2000

* "A Production/Inventory System Subject to Failure with Limited Repair Capacity," Operations Research, with S. M. Iravani and I. Duenyas, 2000

* "A Practical Scheduling Method for Multi-Class Production Systems with Setups," Management Science, 1999

* "Control of a Single-Server Tandem Queueing System with Setups," Operations Research, with I. Duenyas and D. Gupta, 1998

Academic/professional activities:

Associate Editor, Management Science

Chair of the Multi-Echelon Inventory Conference, Ann Arbor 2000

Awards/honors:

NSF CAREER Award, 1999

University of Michigan IOE Department Teaching Excellence Award, 1996, 1997

Thomas W. Ford Fellowship, from Stanford University, 1993

Senior Scholarship in Applied Mathematics, University of Auckland, 1989

Personal interests:

Professor Olsen enjoys hiking, aerobics, cooking, and reading. She is married with a young daughter named Ebba.